Katie Melua @ Cambridge Corn Exchange

Katie Melua played the Cambridge Corn Exchange on Sunday evening, and I went along to it with Rebecca and her sister.

We got there not much more than half-an-hour after the doors opened, but were already too late to catch the support act - Alex McEwan (do you realise how hard it is not to mis-spell his name? :-) which was a bit disappointing. I haven’t heard any of his music, but with a surname like that he must be almost good…

The average age of the crowd was a fair bit higher than I’m used to at gigs, and while that shouldn’t have surprised me, it did rouse the music snob in me. Something that wasn’t helped by the big screen above the stage which was playing videos and adverts which left me wondering how much it was true to the music, and how much was marketing exercise aimed at broadsheet Sunday supplement readers.

I was a little perturbed by these shades of music snobbery; I stopped caring about what people think of my musical tastes back when I was at university (just ask my uni mates about the mix of The Carpenters and The Prodigy that could be heard coming from my room…), and most of the usual suspects are hiding somewhere in my music collection (Keane, Dido…).

I think it was mostly because I hadn’t been really eager to attend the gig myself. I’d listened to her first album a few times when it came out and although it was nice enough, I don’t think it was good enough to warrant buying it. Her second album, Piece by Piece, is much better and made up the majority of her set on Sunday.

There were a couple of tracks from the first album, and quite a few covers - The Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, the Rolling Stones’ 19th Nervous Breakdown and an excellent version of Babylon Zoo’s only hit Spaceman!

By the time we got to the Babylon Zoo number, she’d won me round with her (and her backing band’s) skill and ability, and obvious love of what she’s doing.

Jean-Luc Benazet took some photos of the gig, and they’re currently on the news page of his website, or if you can’t be bothered trying to find them on the news page (no permalinks, grrr) you can see them direct here.